The Book of Paradise: A Yiddish Comic Novel

By Itzik Manger and Itsik Manger

Book Overview

"Electrifying...sparkles with Manger's song and poetry, and is brilliantly layered with literary and folkloric references." -- Tablet

"There is something joyous about Manger's playful language." -- The Jewish Chronicle

The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains -- a delightful new translation perfect for fans of Michael Chabon

Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers, which was written just before the outbreak of World War II.

As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of his previous life when he's born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world.

Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the shtetl.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1782279253
• ISBN13: 9781782279259
• Release Date: September 2023
• Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.6"